Audiences
Automotive
Over the last ten years, consumer demand has driven a large increase in audio and video features and options in the automobile. Once only found in luxury cars, features such as DVD playback, backup cameras, and navigation have become commonplace options in many mainstream automobiles. Rear Seat Entertainment (RSE) units are growing in sophistication with more sources and choices at your fingertips. Each of these options has added to the need and desire for a common networking architecture in the automobile.
While automotive OEMs around the globe have embraced the concept of low-bandwidth vehicle communication networking with Controller Area Network (CAN) being adopted most universally, the unique and varied challenges in vehicle multimedia networking (e.g. bandwidth, QoS, scalability, cost, economies of scale, open vs. proprietary, and supplier choice) has left the door open for much debate over the best solution for multimedia from both a technical and commercial perspective. Historically, the implementation of packet switched networks has been avoided for vehicle multimedia applications due to their non deterministic nature.
The recent work of the IEEE AVB task group offers a draft standards-based approach for highly reliable networked transmission for low latency applications like those found within an automobile. While these AVB protocols can be used on more than one physical layer type, this paper will focus on the application of AVB over Ethernet. Wired Ethernet networks employing AVB protocols are very well suited to automotive deployment due to both simplified cabling and reliability of a hard-wired solution.
For more information, please review the AVB for Automotive Use Whitepaper.
Consumer Electronics
Significant effort has been invested in the industry to enable CE devices to utilize home networks to stream audio and video from one device to another. These efforts have advanced the state of the art for discovery, interoperability, media format compatibility, and stream quality. These efforts also have something else in common: each is layered on top of the Internet Protocol (IP), and each relies on the services provided by the underlying layer-2 bridged Local Area Network (LAN), which includes bandwidth, Quality of Service (QoS) features, latency, reliability of packet delivery, etc. When the underlying services provided by the LAN are enhanced, applications have the opportunity to take advantage of those enhancements.
While the bridging enhancements being developed by the IEEE AVB Task Group allow applications to operate with the reliability, resilience, and accuracy required in professional studios and for live concerts, they are also specified in a way that their implementation complexity can be low, allowing them to be deployed in mass market home/CE applications.
Raw bandwidth enhancements in a network yield speed improvements for applications which send data over that network. While these provide incremental benefit, the core 802.1 AVB standards bring new kinds of services to the network which bring different kinds of improvements for media streaming applications. These new network services include 1) accurate time synchronization, making it possible for multiple devices to render audio and/or video in-sync in a standard way, 2) a reservation protocol which ensures that all devices in the path of a stream have agreed to allow the stream, and 3) a mechanism for ensuring that the requested latency and bandwidth of reserved streams is achieved (over links which do not significantly degrade). AVnu Alliance promotes these standards and compliance and interoperability programs in order to help usher in a new generation of professional quality audio/video streaming within the home.
For more information, please review the AVB for Home/Consumer Electronics Use Whitepaper.
Professional A/V
Over the course of the last decade, Ethernet and Wi-Fi have become the most dominant of all networking technologies. Many people with a computer have at one time or another plugged into an Ethernet network via the RJ45 jack. As time has progressed, both of these technologies have continuously pushed the boundaries of speed--with the current state-of-the-art Ethernet moving to 100Gbps. Given the enormous cost savings in cabling and other infrastructure over analog cable, it seems natural that networked A/V would be very widespread in the professional world, but it is not. Only the largest facilities routinely employ networked systems.
Professional A/V applications have been hampered by two main problems: high per-node cost and daunting technical expertise required to deploy a networked A/V system. These issues could not be tackled by the proprietary solutions that emerged over the last decade. Only the extreme economies of scale realized by standards-based silicon could change the equation in the professional market.
The IEEE AVB Task Group is developing a series of enhancements that provide the means for the highly-reliable delivery of low latency, synchronized audio and video. This technology is expected to provide the capabilities and functionality to construct affordable, high performance professional media networks.
For more information, please review the AVB for Professional A/V Use Whitepaper.
